Meeting time and place

We are meeting this semester in the Biopharm 3rd Floor Fishbowl Mondays and Tuesdays 2-3pm.

Please sign up for two dates on the schedule below. A list of topic ideas follows but you can choose anything related to speciation and hybridization.

Subtopic Ideas:

SPECIATION
1) What did Darwin say about speciation and hybridization? (First week)
2) When does a species become a species? How can the earliest stages of speciation be recognized?
3) How much genetic divergence should we expect within species? Are large genetic divergences within species due to polymorphisms/large population sizes, or artifacts, or are they simply due to our failure to recognize cryptic species?
4) Are there "speciation genes"? What are some examples? Are speciation genes restricted to a certain type of mutation or class of genes?

HYBRIDIZATION: It has been estimated that at least 25% of plant species and 10% animal species hybridize*
1) How much gene flow occurs across species boundaries and what are the consequences for species?
2) How can lineage sorting be separated from hybridization as a cause for phylogenetic uncertainty?
3) How important is hybrid speciation in nature
4) Conservation Biology: Should hybrids be shot or poisoned? Or not?

Mallet, 2005, 2007

Schedule for Spring Semester 2009

Note: the papers linked here require a user name and password to access. If you have forgotten the user name and/or password, contact Chris Simon. If you want to upload a PDF file for an upcoming discussion, use the PDF upload form. Uploading PDFs requires the same user name and password as viewing PDFs.

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009: How should we classify speciation?

Monday April 13th

Topic: This week we'll take a look at speciation and hybridization in the land snail Cerion.
Monday's reading will focus on speciation in this system that Mayr and Rosen (1956) noted as having a "crazy quilt" pattern of distribution.

Tuesday April 14th

Topic: Today we will discuss two papers that examine hybridization in Cerion.

Fifty years of interspecific hybridization: genetics and morphometrics of a controlled experiment on the land snail Cerion in the Florida Keys
DS Woodruff, SJ Gould – Evolution 41(5), 1987, pp.1022-1045